Nia Bowers
There was a sound. You know the one. For about a year it was under everything on your feed and then one day it just wasn’t.
That sound was Tollan Kim. Specifically “Aesthetic,” the track he made with kudasaibeats back in 2022. It got attached to more than 10 million posts. People cooking, people cleaning, people doing those long slow get-ready clips. For a while you genuinely could not scroll without hearing it. And then it faded out and something else took over, the way these things always do.
Except this one didn’t really go away because people got bored of it. The guy behind it stepped back. Two years, no new music. Most people never even knew his name to wonder where he went.
Here’s who he is, since he keeps it quiet. Born in Brazil, lives in South Korea, goes by Lukas. He doesn’t post his face or chase attention. The music just goes out and does the work for him. And it’s done a lot of work. Over 700 billion views on TikTok across everything he’s made, with tracks that keep climbing into the top 10 of the Global Viral 50.
Now the sound is back. He returned with a 21-track album called “Tired at 21,” which is a serious amount of music to drop after going dark for that long. The track leading it is “Aesthetic Garden.”
Listen to “Aesthetic Garden” on Spotify: Aesthetic Garden on Spotify
If you remember the old feeling, it’s still in there. Soft, slow, no vocals, the kind of thing that settles your head without you asking it to. But it’s grown up a little. There’s more sitting under the surface now. A warmth you don’t always get from the lo-fi stuff it gets lumped in with. He’d actually rather you call it Aesthetic Music, his own name for his own lane, and once you sit with it that starts to make sense.
So the sound that quietly ran your feed for a year is back, and the person who made it has more to say than a single. If you ever caught yourself wondering whatever happened to that, now you know.
He’s here if you want to keep up: Tollan Kim on Instagram
